Archive - Dec 2010 - Story

Something big is afoot: Bloomberg has just announced that The Justice Department today will announce arrests in a crackdown on investment frauds including Ponzi schemes and stock market manipulations, according to a U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the matter. It is unclear how much if any of this will be related to the recent investigation into SAC, aka expert networks. But it appears the sting will be one of the biggest in history: "The law enforcement operation, which began in August, involves more than 300 criminal defendants and 180 civil defendants, according to the official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity." We will closely follow and report as we see any news.

John Taylor appeared earlier on the 2011 Reuters Investment Outlook Summit, and among various interesting things (namely another call for EUR-USD parity, and that he would "love to be owning gold right here"), he said that the US is imminently headed for another recession, a development that will boost the USD and weigh on commodities. Yet what is more interesting is that in his latest "Chairman's View", Taylor put down a specific date for the end of the recent recovery in European currencies: the date is tomorrow, the day of the Irish Budget decision, and also the day when Europe may see a coordinated effort for a bank run. Taylor also notes that "the narrowing of credit spreads between these countries and Germany is unlikely to persist for very long without further action by the European leaders." Hopefully the Eurozone meeting taking place right now will result in something more than just more hot air. For those who trade FX, Euro sov bonds, or are just generally interested in the views of the manager of the world's biggest FX hedge fund, we recreate his latest thoughts below.

As Zero Hedge demonstrated last week, comprising the list of international banks rescued by the Fed's Commercial Paper Funding Facility were at least 35 foreign financial corporations. Among these, Barclays was near the very top in terms of capital funded from US taxpayers to preserve the bank's solvency. Which is why we were not at all surprised to read that Barclays' chief rates strategist Joseph Abate had a very sour view of the Fed's release of CPFF details "ironically, the same legislation that forced to [sic] the Fed to disgorge details about these 21,000 transactions makes it much harder for the Fed to recreate these facilities by limiting its ability to use the "exigent circumstances" clause of the Federal Reserve Act." Actually, what we find ironic is that Joseph Abate, formerly a major shareholder of Lehman Brothers, and subsequently assimilated by the British Bank, would be a defender of ongoing Fed secrecy: we have the sinking suspicion that Abate's share losses in his Lehman stake were sizable (as in wiped out), and had he had some transparency into what the true state of affairs of his then bank was, he may have had a chance to actually recoup or mitigate some of his catastrophic losses... But such is life for the sufferer of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby each and every one of us has been kidnapped and held hostage by the banking system. The only question is how friendly (and compensated) we decide to be with our captors.

As readers will recall, just after the abbreviated Thanksgiving session, there were some pretty dramatic afterhours fireworks, both in stocks, and in a variety of volatility indices, that of gold (^GVZ)most notably. As the charts below capture, the drop in the futures had offset basically the entire day's upside in the span of milliseconds, leaving many wondering just what had caused this. Luckily, courtesy of the Tabb Group's Paul Rowady we now know that this was yet another glitch borne out of the hyper-technological sophistication of the current marketplace, in which the smallest error can and will propagate through the system uncontrolled resulting in major losses for those who are aligned on the same side as the ponzi. In other words: it was yet another flash crash which luckily did not have a major impact as virtually no volume was being transacted in the market. All this merely means that Ben Bernanke, who is doing everything in his power to boost asset values, has increasingly more variables working against him as the system continues being pushed ever further away from its natural equilibrium, until one day it all just burns down.

• Reuters 2011 Investment Outlook Summit LIVE (Link) John Taylor speaking now.
• Irish Vote Likely To Pressure Euro (WSJ)
• Bernanke Says Fed May Take More Action to Curb Joblessness (Bloomberg)
• Jobless Report Is Death of Keynesianism (IBD)
• European Officials Split Over Bailout Fund Increase, EU Bond (Bloomberg)
• WikiLeaks' Swedish servers may be under attack (AP)

Moody's Investors Service has today downgraded Hungary's foreign- and local-currency government bond ratings by two notches to Baa3 from Baa1. The key drivers for the downgrades are: 1. Increased concerns about the country's medium- to long-term fiscal sustainability; and 2. Higher external vulnerabilities than most of Hungary's rated peers. "Today's downgrade is primarily driven by the Hungarian government's gradual but significant loss of financial strength, as the government's strategy largely relies on temporary measures rather than sustainable fiscal consolidation policies," says Dietmar Hornung, a Moody's Vice President -- Senior Credit Officer and lead analyst for Hungary. "As a consequence, the country's structural budget deficit is set to deteriorate." Next up: Austria

• Bernanke says Fed may take more action to curb joblessness.
• Euro Finance Chiefs meet today as Belgium seeks bigger crisis fund.
• Most Asian stocks climb as commodity prices gain; Canon leads drop by exporters.
• Qatar shares surge to 2-year high on winning World Cup 2022 bid.
• US, S Korea, in finalizing a sweeping free-trade agreement.
• White House officials and congressional Republicans closing in on a deal that would extend current income-tax rates for all Americans.
• BofA says it has met condition of Tarp exit; close to raising required $3B via asset sales.

In another superficial attempt to demonstrate that things are stabilizing in the European bond market, LCH Clearnet has just lowered margins on Irish bonds to 30% from the 45% it had raised margins to on November 25. Presumably all it takes for a clearer to get confidence back in a given market is just a few billion in purchases by a given central bank. Perhaps instead of being concerned with a few short sellers distorting the market, LCH should actually consider what would happen to its entire clearing market in European bonds should the ECB bid be pulled. Of course, fudging with margins is so much easier to pretend control over the situation than to really go to the heart of the key destabilizing factor...

Last night, in a less than surprising Op-ed in the FT, Jean-Claude Juncker and Giulio Tremonti, prime minister and treasury minister of Luxembourg and Italy’s minister of economy and finance respectively, once again floated the idea that the time has come for a joint European bond issuance mechanism, because apparently lack of individual monetary policy is not enough, European countries now have to surrender their fiscal decision making to a bunch of dogmatic bureaucrats in Brussels. The desperate duo, which knows all too well, that they could well be next on the bond vigilantes radar, write: " The European Council could move as early as this month to create such an agency, with a mandate gradually to reach an amount of outstanding paper equivalent to 40 per cent of the gross domestic product of the European Union and of each member state." We ridiculed the idea last night, noting that this proposal would only happen over Germany's dead body, which already sees as contributing far too much to keeping the European experiment alive and getting only dirty looks from its voters. Today, Germany steps up and confirms: "Germany on Monday rejected the idea of increasing the size of the European Union's safety net and ruled out a proposal to issue a joint euro zone bond." And additionally recent pressure to hike the rescue fund by the IMF and internally were also promptly shut down by Germany, which as we pointed out last week threatened to pull out of the Euro if the political wrangling by pathological liars such as the Greek elite continued: "We see no reason at all at the moment for an increase in the size of the euro rescue shield -- no reason at all." Which means that with no recourse to do anything structural, the ECB is back to buying up Portuguese bonds in a fake bid to create a sense of normalcy in the bond market, which everyone with half a brain knows will collapse the second the ECB pulls out or runs out of paper.

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 06/12/10

November US nonfarm payrolls missed big, with a +39k print vs +150k expected and even higher whisper numbers, sending the unemployment rate to 9.8%, above the 9.6% consensus estimates. US stocks & USD sold off in tandem on the news, while Tsys were bid; however, bonds and equities reversed sharply from there, while the USD remained depressed. The x-factor was gold, up over 2% on Friday, which again shows signs of trading more as a rates/FX product than a commodity.

Just released - apology #3 from Jan Hatzius on his ill-timed "golden age" call. We expect many more. We almost feel sorry for the German strategist and the replacement of FRBNY's Bill Dudley. "Nice timing on our GDP forecast upgrade! The November employment report was a disappointment, and there weren’t a lot of redeeming features buried underneath the headlines. Private sector payroll growth fell back to +50k, the slowest pace since January 2010. The household survey was also weak, with a rise in the unemployment rate to 9.82% and a drop in the employment/population ratio to 58.18%, just a hair above the cycle low seen in December 2009. The jobs report followed higher initial jobless claims on Thursday and a soft manufacturing ISM survey on Wednesday."

By now, everyone has heard accusations that Cash4Gold is nothing but a predatory site, seeking to "steal" the gold of people in distress for a painfully low price. Often times these stories involve Glenn Beck in some capacity. Of course, there is always "the other side" to every story. Below we provide just one such "other" side. It just so happens that the side is about as funny as it gets.

Bernanke: Economic Recovery 'May Not Be' Self-Sustaining

Bernanke: Could Buy More Bonds Depending On Inflation, 'How Economy Looks'

Bernanke: Getting 'Awfully Close' To Range Where Prices Start Falling

Bernanke: Could Be 4-5 Years Before US Sees 'More Normal' Unemployment Rate

Bernanke: Defends Plan To Buy Treasury Securities

Bernanke: High Unemployment Rate 'Primary Source Of Risk' To Economy

Bernanke: Double-Dip Recession 'Doesn't Seem Likely'

When we first heard of the latest Wikileaks "cablegate" fiasco, we speculated that Hillary Clinton may be forced to resign for what is rapidly becoming the biggest crisis for US foreign policy since the Bay of Pigs. Today, in an interview with Spanish El Pais, Julian Assange goes one better and says that if it is proven that he approved the spying on UN officials, then Obama should resign. As a reminder as per one of the released cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for UN personnel's telephones, emails, credit card details and frequent flier numbers. Let's recall that Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment under somewhat comparable circumstances. The only difference is that back then Woodward and Berstein were not on the receiving end of what is becoming an endless barrage of death threats for doing their journalistic duty. This time around, the "deep throat" is the target of an international witch hunt, where however is moot: the early attempt by the like of Joe Lieberman to censor the internet is doomed from the beginning. However, it does show that in the past 40 years little has changed at the top echelons of power when the sordid truth of "Standard Operating Procedures" are revealed. And, unfortunately, things have only gotten worse. Also, keep in mind that Wikileaks has so far released only a small fraction of the 250,000 cables that will ultimately be declassified by Wiki. One wonders just how long the world can maintain the damage control before foreign relations between both friends and enemies are terminally frayed.